Refunds

In Wild Apricot, you can process and track refunds for payments you have already received.

There are two types of refunds:

automatic – for online payments to payment systems that support automatic refunds.

manual – for manual payments and other offline payments.

All refunds are related to payment records in your Wild Apricot account, and can be automatically or manually settled to a particular payment.

A refund can be full, when a complete payment amount is returned, or partial, when only a partial amount is returned. Therefore, a payment record can be refunded and settled with one or more partial refunds.

Automatic refunds

Automatic refunds are online refunds that are issued outside of Wild Apricot but are automatically recorded and settled within your Wild Apricot account.

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Automatic refunds are supported by the following payment systems:

PayPal Standard

PayPal Payments Pro

PayPal Express Checkout

To issue a refund for payments using one of the supported payment systems, a Wild Apricot administrator follows these steps:

Log into your PayPal account.

Find the payment transaction you want to refund.

Within the payment details, click the Issue Refund or similarly named button or option.

Indicate the amount of the refund.

Save or otherwise complete the refund.

A refund notice will be created and automatically sent to Wild Apricot after the administrator confirms the refund. After receiving a refund notice, Wild Apricot will perform the following actions:

Record a confirmation that the refund notice was received.

Create a new refund record.

Find the corresponding payment and automatically settle the refund with the payment. If the corresponding payment is not found or if the refund notice is not received by Wild Apricot (e.g. due to some technical malfunction) then the refund has to be processed manually.

If you issue an automatic refund for a settled payment, the refund will be applied to the payment and the corresponding invoice will become unpaid.

Manual refunds

You can issue a manual refund for any payment recorded in Wild Apricot. Manual refunds are typically used in the following cases:

Refund is for a manual payment

Refund was issued manually outside of Wild Apricot (e.g. by check or cash) for an online payment

Refund was issued by an online payment system that does not support automatic refunds

Refund was issued by an online payment system that does support automatic refunds but Wild Apricot did not receive the refund notification

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Wild Apricot does not process any transactions, so recording manual refunds in Wild Apricot will not result in the transfer of any funds. The transferring of funds associated with a manual refund must be initiated by you from within your payment processor.

Issuing a refund against a payment

Usually, a refund is recorded for a corresponding payment. You can only refund payments that have open balance (not fully settled to one or more invoices).

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To issue a refund against a particular payment, follow these steps:

Find the payment in question, either from a contact's financial transactions list or from the Payments & refunds screen within the Finances module.

If the payment is already settled, click the Cancel settlement button.

Now that your payment record has available balance, you can proceed with the refund by clicking the Refund button.

On the next screen, you can adjust the details of the refund, and record a custom payment tender – the method by which the refund was issued.

When you are finished entering the refund details, click the Refund button.

Issuing refunds to an account

Instead of issuing a refund for a particular payment, you can issue a refund directly to a contact's account without settling the refund to any particular payment. You can, at any time in the future, settle the refund to a payment.

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To issue a refund to an account, follow these steps:

Hover over the Finances menu and select the Payment & refunds option.

From the Payments & refunds screen, click the Add refund button.

On the Add refund screen, click Select existing contact and then select the contact from the list.

After you select the contact, fill out the refund details and click the Save button.

The refund will reduce the available balance for the contact. The refund will be marked as not settled. To settle the refund, you need to find an unsettled payment for the contact and settle it with the refund.

Manually settling refunds

Refunds initiated from PayPal are automatically settled with the corresponding payment. Refunds issued against a recorded payment are settled with that payment. However, if you record a refund to a contact's account, you can settle the refund manually.